Adrift
by Cacotechny
Summary: Tensions over Dead Town come to the surface. [Pre-Jak 2, oneshot]


The open door caught her off-guard.

It wasn't supposed to be open. At least not yet. She stepped into the opening, the weekly report forgotten in her hands.

Sure enough, there he was, long thin hands hovering over a keyboard, lost in concentration over something on his computer. Where he wasn't supposed to be.

"What are you doing?"

Only his eyes moved, flicking up to take her in with one glance before turning back to the monitor. She could see the dark circles under his eyes and the gauntness in his face from across the room. The stitches on the half-healed cut across his cheek stood out against the pale of his skin.

"What does it look like? I'm working." His voice rasped like a wire brush over gun metal.

"You're supposed to be in a hospital bed."

"I got bored."

"You were unconscious up until two days ago."

"I get bored easily."

Prick. Ashelin frowned impressively and tucked her folder under one arm. She stepped into his office and closed the door behind her. "Torn, I get you're dedicated to your work, but this crosses the line." She jabbed an angry finger at him. "You're going back."

This time, his own frown mirrored her own. "Ashelin, I'm not exactly in a position to be wasting time convalescing in the hospital. I spend one more second there than I need to, and this seat goes to somebody else. Erol's been eyeing me like a vulture since I walked in the building."

"Not if you kill yourself in the process! Need I remind you how you ended up half-dead on the floor of the Interlock with—"

"No, you don't!" She flinched at the gunshot crack of his voice. It left her almost reeling, and she felt herself nearly fall up against the door. There were very few times Torn ever raised his voice to her – during basic training (because he yelled at everybody then) and once when she overstepped some boundaries on a patrol and nearly got a few people killed. He yelled a lot after that, and she deserved it.

But this was different.

He turned back to the monitor, tapping angrily at a few keys with ashes smoldering behind his eyes. "You don't need to remind me. I remember. Every last second of it. Watching civilians and KG alike get dragged down by Metal Heads. Watching entire platoons abandon their posts." He stopped typing. "Having the ruler of this city, a man who's supposed to be watching out for the people, tell me to retreat and just leave his people _to die_."

Instead of his voice raising in anger, it got quieter and quieter. He wasn't looking so much at her as he was through her at some phantom she couldn't see but he could, and it left her feeling cold. A sneer curled his lip. "Oh, you don't need to remind me about anything."

"Torn…"

He fell back into his chair. Whatever vestige of strength he'd been maintaining faded, and the phantom he'd been fighting turned into only pain. He coughed dryly and winced. She stayed silent, expectant, and watched a battle rage its way across his face. Finally, he spoke.

"We can't… _I_ can't do this." His head hung low while his hands seems to search around for the right words. "It's taken me a long time to wake up. Since the attack on the Metal Head nest, Praxis has been…different."

Ashelin felt her eyes narrow. "What do you mean?" When he finally looked up at her, the trepidation on his face surprised her. They both knew what came of the personnel who criticized the powers that be, so it shouldn't have surprised her. But still it did.

"He's taken over. Completely. Curfews. Press gangs. People who happen to disagree with him? They disappear." He looked back down, suddenly self-conscious. "He's been tightening his grip on this city since day one, but it's taken me a long time to realize it." He got to his feet abruptly. The movement made the blood drain from his face but a feverish energy kept him upright. He started to pace. "And Damas? That wasn't nearly as much of an abdication as it was just him getting overthrown. The war was just an excuse. Where does it stop?"

"Torn, you need to be careful here." She stepped forward to stop his pacing, laying her report down on a chair. He fought her grip for a second but did not push her away. "I know the Baron's methods are extreme, but there is a war going on here. If he can't get perfect discipline from his troops, then we're going to lose. We have to keep the good of the populace in mind, even if it means sacrificing the few. You've said that yourself. That's why the Guard exists. That's how we're going to win."

Adrift. That was it. That was why she felt like she barely knew the man standing in front of her. She'd never seen Torn anything less than sure of himself, less than 100% committed to the cause. Of anyone, he was the most firmly rooted in his convictions. An immoveable object to which life adapted rather than the opposite. He didn't ask for help; others asked him.

But now he was adrift. Whatever happened out there beyond the new wall, in Dead Town as people were calling it now, had shaken him. And now he was asking for help. She could tell by the way he didn't fight her when she put a hand to his cheek; a decisive Torn would've cast her hand aside. "If you would've stayed on that wall, your men would've died. The people you did save would've died." The memory of him lying on the floor of the interlock, shredded and broken and trying not to drown in his own blood, made her breath catch. "And you would've died, too. I don't ever want that to happen." She cupped his face with her hand and stood on tiptoe to kiss his stupid, stubborn forehead. When he looked up at her, he did look a little less lost, but a somberness lingered there in his expression. He sighed, catching and lowering her hands in his own. She didn't like how cold they were.

"I know," he said softly. "I'm just…" Lost. Adrift. Floating. At loose ends. "Tired. I guess."

"You went above and beyond for the people of this city, and nobody is going to forget that. I've heard people talk you're being put up for a Krimzon Cross."

A little bit of the old Torn came to the surface in the annoyed roll of his eyes. "Praxis probably feels obligated since I made it back alive."

She pulled her hands out of his, mostly in mock disgust at his half-hearted but typically dark sense of humor. "You can't just see the good in people, can you?"

He opened his mouth to speak but seemed to think better of it. "Call me a skeptic," he managed, forcing a small smirk.

"You mean pessimist, right?"

"Whatever." At least the agitation in his body language seemed to be less. Well, she'd be his anchor if he couldn't find one himself.

"Just promise me you won't stay late tonight. Hell, go home early. You've made your point, I think." She turned to make for the door. This was usually the part, since the door was closed, when he'd grab her arm and pull her in for a swift peck on the lips, but not today. His voice stopped her instead.

"Ashelin." She turned around, heart beating nervously in her chest. He didn't hold his shoulders straight, he didn't stand up straight, and his chest wasn't out, but his expression was austere and made of iron. "This isn't just about sacrificing the few for the many. This is about saving the many from the decisions of the few, and in this case, the few is just one man. And that one man is your father."

It took a few seconds for that to process. What was he doing, trying to piss her off? Was this some sort of test? A sudden rush of anger made her flush. "So what exactly are you saying?"

"I don't know how I feel about serving under a man who thinks it's okay to leave people behind just so he can make it seem like sort of tough decision. Retreat is one thing." He turned away to sit back down behind his desk. He winced again, a hand pressed to his side. "Abandoning people to die is another. Something has to be done."

"But you've been okay with everything else until now? You have a near-death experience and suddenly everything you've ever done and fought for has been wrong?"

"I was blind. Praxis made this transition so subtly, none of saw it coming. When I joined, Haven was rough, yeah, but at least we had some freedom. Now people are afraid to leave their houses!"

"Because there's a war going on! And as Dead Town shows us, anywhere can get attacked!"

"Dead Town was planned! It had to have been! How else would the new wall have been ready and suddenly available to fall back to when the damn thing didn't even have power applied to it until two days before? And if it was ready, then why the hell weren't the people in that sector evacuated sooner?"

Unbelievable. This was insanity. A voice in the back of her head tried to beg for clemency, but her anger drowned it out. Praxis wasn't perfect, but if there was anyone who was going to get them out of this war, it was him. Nostrils flaring, she stomped over to his desk and slammed an angry fist down on it. "I'll not stand for you accusing my father, the protector of this city, and _your_ Baron of betraying the people."

"You don't have to stand. There's a chair right there." He got to his feet slowly, dangerously, and leaned in towards her. "And you'll take care to watch your tone with me."

Her hand came up off the desk to slap the superior, righteous look right off his face, but she managed to catch herself. "You can just watch me leave, then, _Captain_." He flinched like she had indeed struck him but didn't say anything. He just watched her leave.

She didn't speak to Torn for the next week outside of whatever was needed to say for their jobs. Thinking on it, a sickly dread crept into her mind – here was Torn, KG top brass and called one of Praxis's most loyal captains, saying things that had gotten other people personal appointments with the Baron's special investigators or thrown in jail or exiled. Maybe he was suffering from a head injury – major personality changes occasionally happened from those, right? If he made it look like his loyalties were changing, she didn't want to think about what might happen.

She was walking down the middle of the hallway when that thought crossed her mind, and it nearly brought her to a screeching halt. The fear in Torn's face was honest. They were all afraid.

Torn did get the Krimzon Cross some weeks later. She stood at the front of the assembly with the other lieutenants to watch. To anyone else, nothing seemed askew. Not some days prior, another survivor from the wall had been awarded the same honor – Corporal Duran, a mere child in comparison, but he managed to claw his way back to civilization as the only survivor left from his unit. He came back to glory, flashing cameras, and singing the Baron's praises for the benefits and publicity. Of course, he didn't mean it in any manipulative way. He was just a kid who'd been given the same propaganda and biased commentary they'd all been given since they first stepped onto the parade ground, and he believed it with every fiber of his being. He believed he made it back because of the Baron.

But this time, though the cameras flashed and the reporters chattered into their mic units, the atmosphere remained subdued. Somber. Obligatory. The appreciative smile Praxis gave so warmly to Duran was instead replaced by something closer to a grudgingly respectful sort of grimace as he pinned the medal to the front of Torn's armor. Torn's expression never once wavered from cold and indifferent professionalism, but Ashelin noticed he wouldn't look Praxis in the eye, opting instead to stare icily over the Baron's shoulder like a patient avoiding the sight of an injection needle going into an arm. At the end of the ceremony and only then did he finally blink and briefly glance in her direction.

There was nothing adrift about him now. He seemed every bit as anchored as he did before Dead Town. Except now the fatalistic determination in the set of his mouth made her angry, and she couldn't quite place why. For the first time in a long time, she couldn't tell what he was thinking.

And then he was gone, walking away down the center of the assembly behind Praxis with the rest of the official party.

Two weeks later, the Archives blew up, killing Duran in the process of him starting his new job off the beat. Torn's face, grim and resolute, came up on a recording that was replayed over and over again for weeks. What he talked about in it didn't matter. The news just muted it and gave their own interpretation with cherry-picked sound bites. Competing analysts and government officials yelled at each other about it while big letters declaring the former captain a traitor marched across the bottom of the news screen.

And Ashelin watched all the while in silence. Deep down in her soul, she believed in her father. She believed he would make Haven City better. He already had, had cleaned up the streets, had built up old crumbling walls and defenses and took the fight to the enemy. But somehow she wasn't overly surprised that Torn did what he did. She realized now what he was thinking that day at the award ceremony, and she knew that he knew what the consequences were. What it would do to her.

She felt lost. At loose ends. She was adrift. And, damn, did it hurt.

* * *

AN: So I'm making this officially part of a series of vingettes about what happened before Jak 2 partially with the Underground but mostly regarding Torn and Ashelin. I sort of hate how the rhythm works out in some parts, and a good bit of it is not as eloquent as I'd like, but here we are. Just a quick one-shot I put together last night to get it out of the way to work on other things. As always, let me know what you think!


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